Online Censorship

As well as The Digital Divide, online censorship is considered a barrier to access, as people cannot always view the online content they want to.

Social networking sites and the Internet, in general, are constantly under high surveillance, which is a reason why people may prefer to use alternative methods of communication.  But communicating online has its benefits when it comes to censorship. 

Users can post comments on web pages anonymously.  This means that, even though censoring all comments on the web is impossible, even if the comment does become censored, the guilty user does not have to be identified.  This makes cruel tasks like identity fraud and cyberbullying all the more easier to achieve.


Why is fullproof online censorship so difficult to achieve?


New content is being uploaded to the Internet and updated everyday.  Whether it is in the form of new websites, webpages, social-networking profiles, blog posts, YouTube videos or users comments, each new piece of material is making the web more and more difficult to manage.

It is simply impossible to analyse every piece of information on the Internet and judge whether it is suitable for viewers.  That isn't just due the extremely high amount of new content, but also to the diversity of Internet users in terms of age, gender, race, culture, religion, education, occupation and social class.  A piece of content that is interesting, humorous or educational to one viewer, may highly offend another.

This infographic conveys the most commonly censored content currently online:

So why is it that blogs take up 20% of all censored content? 

They are entirely user-generated.  Users create the blog posts and users comment on them.


This means that before the content is created, it isn't regulated or checked against any legislation.

International Government Organisations are completely opposite to user-generated blogs, which is why the exist at the other end of the scale - they do not require nearly as much censoring.

References

Infographic from webpage
PAVLUS, J. 2011. Infographics: Internet Censorship Is Rampant Around the World [online]. New York: Mansueto Ventures, LLC. Available from: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663164/infographics-internet-censorship-is-rampant-around-the-world [Accessed on 30 March 2012]